Clothing With a Byline

Fashion’s quest to mint its own class of superheroes has been voracious. First there were the models, leggy and unattainable. Then came the designers, cults of personality with fervent followings. More recently, it’s been the street-style icons, people who invent themselves in front of the mirror every morning in hopes of being captured by a camera.

Now, fashion, perhaps out of runway, has come for its own chroniclers: the journalists, the bloggers, the creative directors. Last week, in a pure distillation of the style echo chamber, a brand named Baewear opened an online store (baewear.bigcartel.com) full of T-shirts that reference the hip-hop-themed humor that dominates the online men’s wear conversation and, most notably, a handful that immortalize some of the loudest voices in online men’s wear journalism.

One of the first designs, which are largely sketches based on photos, was of Lawrence Schlossman, the editor in chief of Four Pins, over a Saint Laurent logo modified to read Saint Lawrence. Soon after, Jon Moy, one of the site’s writers, was done up in a pose holding a cane, with accompanying text from “Grindin,’ ” the drug-dealing anthem by the Clipse, swapping in “cane” for “ ’caine.”

“We think it makes sense with social media that no one is just a name or a voice anymore,” a Baewear representative wrote in an email. “You are your selfie outfits, your Instagram pictures, your specific location tags. Everyone has the potential to be a brand or create a following that is interested in an all-access pass to your life and personality.”

The rep requested anonymity because the people involved in the company all work at established fashion companies, and “we like our jobs.” (“Bae” is Twitter-speak for “babe.”)

“We wanted an outlet to turn micromemes into physical products immediately,” the representative continued. “We don’t have to wait for approval or worry about designs fitting in with an overall ‘brand image’ before putting things up on the webstore.”

The young men’s wear illuminati have responded to this attention mostly with sheepishness, with a side helping of lashing out. Jake Gallagher, a writer for the men’s site A Continuous Lean, tweeted “#StopBaewear” and within a day was rewarded (or perhaps punished) with a T-shirt of his own. The Baewear store has been adding designs almost daily.

“It’s so of-the-second,” said Mr. Schlossman, who said his first reaction was embarrassment, followed by a sort of muted enthusiasm: “It’s crazy flattering.”

Who these shirts are for, beyond the loved ones of the immortalized, isn’t wholly clear. The Baewear representative said most of the T-shirts had sold in the double digits thus far, and even suggested that if a particular design became too popular, it would be discontinued.

“Does it make any sense to create a T-shirt that might appeal to maybe 20-30 people tops? For us it does,” the Baewear representative wrote. “We are very aware of the limited demand for what we are doing. At the same time, there is a small group out there that is in on the joke and that’s who we planned to create for in the first place. At the end of the day, we do it for the LOLs.”

This type of inside-baseball celebration isn’t wholly without precedent. A few years ago, Deer Dana drew Grace Coddington for a T-shirt, and there are endless bootleg Anna Wintour options. And Baewear has kin in Mark McNairy, who in February walked a T-shirt down the runway celebrating Jim Moore, the longtime GQ creative director, using an exuberant vulgarity for emphasis — a reverent gesture delivered with irreverence.

“The whole room’s looking at me,” Mr. Moore, calling in from Milan, recalled of that moment. “I turned a couple of shades of purple.”

For the constitutionally modest Mr. Moore, the shirt, which is still for sale on Mr. McNairy’s online store, and which Channing Tatum was recently photographed wearing, was a validation of his hard work in the shadows.

“It certainly isn’t something I’m going to shout out myself, so he did it for me,” he said. “Anyone can be a hero.”